The HuffPo-ization of the Right

“We have no right to be boring or irrelevant,” Tucker Carlson says. “The Washington Post already has that covered.” Beneath the bluster, Carlson, the conservative pundit and former Crossfire co-host, has reason to brag: The Daily Caller, the news site he founded in 2010, has defied insider snickering to become a major news source for the right. “What I despise most about the legacy media isn’t just that they’re mindlessly liberal, though they are,” Carlson says, “but that they’re conventional and boring and unwilling to report unfashionable truths. That’s death.”

The Caller will never be called boring. Carlson and his staff of 50 draw visitors to the site with a blend of high-energy reporting (especially on anything having to do with the Obama administration), right-leaning opinion columns and a hearty dose of semi-SFW slideshows of the female form. “We care about traffic,” Carlson told me unapologetically.

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The Caller is more than click-bait, though: It’s a gamble that right-leaning readers hunger not only for opinion pieces written by their own—the bread and butter of established conservative magazines like the Weekly Standard and National Review and the Wall Street Journal opinion page—but that they’re looking for news reported by their own as well. In recent years, a whole new media ecosystem has sprung up around this premise, bringing new energy and digital savvy (and a lot more busty slideshows) to compete with the occasionally stodgy old outlets of the right.

The energy behind the moment, without question, is the hardening opposition to President Obama and the glimpse of life beyond his second term. As the Obama era slouches wearily into its sixth year, conservatives see the chance—the mandate, even—to torment, debunk and distract from his agenda, even to effect its failure. That might feel familiar. As Ben Domenech, who co-founded RedState and, more recently, a new conservative site called the Federalist, pointed out to me, it’s “kind of the same way there was a proliferation of folks on the left starting up places” like the Huffington Post and Think Progress at a similar point in President George W. Bush’s tenure. In the eyes of the left, the media herd had fatally discredited itself by accepting the Bush administration’s Iraq intelligence. The time seemed right for a more activist era of journalism, and the new liberal blogs—back before blogs were declared over—took as a founding principle the notion that they could be both opinionated and purveyors of news.

That philosophy has since been enthusiastically embraced by media entrepreneurs on the right, who see in what Sarah Palin famously called “the lame-stream media” an establishment hopelessly biased against their cause. The new outlets range widely in size, scope and bent. Smaller, more targeted sites like the Washington Free Beacon and Domenech’s Federalist seek to go deep on the issues and sway the conversation in Washington. The Blaze, founded by Glenn Beck in 2010, sees enormous traffic—more than 20 million unique visitors over the last month, dwarfing its competitors—and is far more omnivorous, almost as if Yahoo! were reimagined by a fierce conservative. (The site’s “ About” page concludes: “We answer to God and you.”) The elder statesman of the group, Breitbart.com, which was founded in 2007 by the late provocateur Andrew Breitbart, seems to be the outlet of choice for Tea Party activists. “If you’re going to be carrying a ‘Don’t Tread on Me’ flag outside the Capitol building, you’re probably going to Breitbart first,” a Republican press strategist told me. The Daily Caller, for its part, sits somewhere in the middle, playing both the inside and outside game.

What the Right Reads

The top stories of 2013 (in terms of page views)—and what they say about what makes conservatives click.

All together, these outlets add up to a movement with sufficient mass to make a measurable difference in how politics is reported. “Our coverage of proposed immigration reform/amnesty, the attack on gun rights, and the Obamacare debacle shaped both the debate and the outcome,” Alex Marlow, Breitbart’s editor in chief boasted in an email. “We also fought back, successfully, against various media outlets that are hostile to those with Judeo-Christian and conservative values.”

As another conservative put it: “You could spend $5 million on a week of ads, and what do you get for that? For $5 million you can launch a newspaper and beat up the administration all year.”

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Certainly Carlson, Domenech and the rest have done their share of beating up on Obama. But the idea is to go beyond landing punches and build an actual readership by getting people to stay on the page. So, hours after Obama announced that newly canceled health care plans would be un-canceled for a year, the DailyCaller led with a grabbily headlined news item: “If You Don’t Like My Plan, You Can Tweak It.” But also featured on the site that day were “ Here’s the newest Playboy playmate” and a listicle touting “ 15 hottest moments from the Victoria’s Secret fashion show.” Carlson is unapologetic about the high-low vibe; he just hired gossip columnist Betsy Rothstein from the media water-cooler site FishbowlDC, and he plans to add more sports coverage, too. As for the salacious stuff, Carlson defends the more titillating fare as “celebrating pulchritude in a way that’s edifying and uplifting”—before conceding the more relevant point: “In any case, readers love it.”

Apparently. According to Carlson, the Caller had more than 9 million unique visitors in October, rivaling websites like Slate and, well, Politico. He’s circumspect about the Caller’s financials but said the site has been making money for a little more than a year. “I’ll put it this way,” he said, “in contrast to virtually everyone else in Washington, we aren’t a nonprofit.”

The news organization that Carlson built reflects his own attributes—cavalier, colorful, at times impolitic—occasionally to a fault. In June of last year, Neil Munro, a Caller reporter, interrupted Obama during a Rose Garden speech on immigration, shouting, “Why’d you favor foreigners over Americans?” The outburst earned the Daily Caller a round of finger-wagging from the White House, and from frustrated competitors. Carlson stepped in to cover for his man, saying, “This is what reporters are supposed to do. They're supposed to get their questions answered.” Then in March, the Caller found itself in hot water over a shaky story about two Dominican women who claimed that Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) had paid them for sex, which Menendez denied outright, satisfying most other outlets that there was no story. A lawyer for the women came forward to say that someone from the Caller had paid him to find prostitutes who would fabricate such a story. Carlson denied the lawyer’s charges.

“I think the Caller's work over the years has been decidedly mixed,” said Jon Ward, a former White House correspondent for the Daily Caller who now works at Huffington Post. “But I'm cheering for them to keep moving closer to the bar Tucker set in 2009, when he talked about a conservative outlet with the same kind of accuracy and depth and insight in reporting as the New York Times.” In an email, Ward credited Carlson with encouraging him to “swing for the fences more often, to punch hard (my emphasis to him was that I wanted my punches to connect), to not be so worried about angering a government official or a politician.” Carlson, Ward said, “taught me to give fewer fucks.”